


Bowbroken

by aderyn



Series: Deep Map [8]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: somatic navigation, that sweet interior architecture, the heart the heart, the usefulness of the violin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-23
Updated: 2012-08-23
Packaged: 2017-11-12 17:45:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/493976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The city is the body and the body is the city. </p>
<p>It makes so much sense, as much sense as anything, really, when you’ve seen a man navigate somatically, with his hands and his teeth and his lungs and his veins, watched him come to you smiling across steaming pavement and heard him stroke the night-sounds into submission with his fingers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bowbroken

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to [professorfangirl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lizeckhart/pseuds/professorfangirl) for the mind-body problem and the [muddy hymnal](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOsjbV-DlX4). And to Songster, for  
> [people transformed into instruments.](http://songstersmiscellany.tumblr.com/post/26357813499/valeria2067-headcanon-moriarty-sent-this-to)

The city is the body and the body is the city.

It makes so much sense, as much sense as anything, really, when you’ve seen a man navigate somatically, with his hands and his teeth and his lungs and his veins, watched him come to you smiling across steaming pavement and heard him stroke the night-sounds into submission with his fingers.

“The heart has so many metaphors around it,” says John’s cardiologist friend, “all of them useless.”

“Right,” says John, hoisting his ale.  It’s good for the heart, isn’t it, in moderation, as everything.  So are these wood-panels, these paint-thickened panes, the shining tin of the ceiling, this exchange that is not bent, not mad, not what the layman calls whiplash and the doctor calls cervical acceleration injury.

He can find his way home, a little tired, a little drunk, navigate by the gut and the street, not the stars.

*******

They’ve both done violence and had it done to them, but Sherlock’s life was mostly tender intellectual mercies right up to the point where it wasn’t.

So if John braves the stairs and finds him laid out on the kitchen floor with his bow across his chest, he might (find his heart first), frisk him for injuries, dangerous compounds, stillettoed objects, anything he might have done harm to himself with other than the horsehair and ebony and odd wood, only to find sweet wrappers and a wine cork in his pockets and well, he’s just asleep, the brain having spoken and the nerves having sung, _enough, and the city is not enough to hold you up, friend, dear as you are to it, and neither is your friend there, dear as you are to him._

But I am, John thinks, even exhausted, or pissed, or winded, or lost. I am.

*******

When Sherlock grieves he does it in minor, as he ought, the mourning in the tendons and the neurons and every up and downbow until he nearly gave John a vision, once, of the violin. It wasn’t really a vision.  It wasn’t really a violin. It was fingers.  It was bones. It was a lost lover, that sweet interior architect changed into notes and seeded over the street, limbs creeping into buildings and eyes into windows and the city was the body--entwined and then chastised, goaded and awakened.

He thought he was asleep, but he’s awake now, typing, clear-headed, quickly for once: the fingers, the heart, the bridges, the buildings, the ceiling, the tin, the keyboard, the wood, the pavement, the street humming outside, the steam rising off the pavement, the ebony, the hair, the breath on his neck.

“What are you writing,” Sherlock says, hoarse and wry in the pre-dawn, up from the floor and the clean towel John rolled under his neck and the blanket cast over him like light, “as though you could break day?” 

_The heart has so many metaphors around it, all of them useless._

“Wrong, “Sherlock says, as he picks up his bow.

 


End file.
